Monday, June 9, 2008

CFA > The Analyst

Hey everybody. Sorry I haven't posted in a while - I took a day off (from posting - not the internship) for the CFA and then the internet in my apartment wasn't working over the weekend. I'm waiting for the research guys to send me back some information about past deals, so I have a few minutes to give an update of what's been going on for the past few days.

So the CFA Exam was a beast. I was stressed out because I hadn't studied as much as I would have liked to for such a major exam. I went on eBay two weeks ago to buy a calculator that is allowed for the exam, and it was supposed to come in 2-3 days. It never came. I borrowed one from one of the analysts here, but I only had one day to figure out how it works, so that was a little annoying as well.

We took the test in a huge auditorium at some events center down by Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. There must have been 3000-4000 people there all sitting for the Level I exam. Most of the people looked like they were in their 20's, but I saw quite a few peope who had to be over 40. I sat next to an Australian and a Romanian, so there was a good international showing.

So the exam was pretty tough, and I wish I would have studied the statistics stuff more. It seemed like there was a lot of calculating standard deviations and variances. I really have no idea what my overall score would be or if I will pass. I would say that on about 55-60% of the questions I felt confident that I had the right answer. On another 20-25% of the questions, I had it narrowed down to two chioces and I don't know if I chose correctly or not. on the remaining 15-25%, I either couldn't narrow it down to two or I just guessed because I had never heard of what they were asking about.

All in all I think that most people I talked to got nailed on the exam, and we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out. After the test I went back to the office for a few hours and worked on some company profiles. It feels good not to have that test hanging over my head, and now I can just use my "free" time to re-build models. I'm working on a simple accretion/dilution model right now.

1 comment:

WARPANG said...

Dude, can you believe the CFA? I thought it was easier than the Kaplan practice material, yet I couldn't feel confident on enough questions to say I passed. I don't think that the test itself was so discouraging as I think to myself, "Man, if you would have just focused a little more on your studies you could have aced that test!"

Internship here I come, ready or not! I will be out there for training next week. I will stop by the firm, to say hello. I should have my blog up sometime this weekend.